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The Enemy of Nature

The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?

Zed Books Ltd and Fernwood Publishing

Introduction

In 1970, growing fears for the integrity of the planet gave rise to a new awareness and a new politics. On April 22, the first "Earth Day" was announced, since to become an annual event of re-dedication to the preservation and enhancement of the environment. The movement affected ordinary people and, remarkably, certain members of the elites, who, organized into a group called the Club of Rome, even dared to announce a theme never before entertained by persons of power. This appeared as the title of their 1972 manifesto, The Limits to Growth.

Thirty years later, Earth Day 2000 featured a colloquy between Leonardo de Caprio and President Bill Clinton, with much fine talk about saving nature. The anniversary also provided a convenient vantage point for surveying the results of three decades of "limiting growth." At the dawn of a new millennium, one could observe the following:

• The human population had increased from 3.7 billion to 6 billion (62 percent).

• Oil consumption had increased from 46 million barrels a day to 73 million.

• Natural gas extraction had increased from 34 trillion cubic feet per year to 95 trillion.

• Coal extraction had gone from 2.2 billion metric tonnes to 3.8 billion.

• The global motor vehicle population had almost tripled, from 246 million to 730 million.

• Air traffic had increased by a factor of six.

• The rate at which trees are consumed to make paper had doubled, to 200 million metric tons per year.

• Human carbon emissions had increased from 3.9 million metric tons annually to an estimated 6.4 million — this despite the additional impetus to cut back caused by an awareness of global warming, which was not perceived to be a factor in 1970.

• As for this warming, average temperature increased by 1°F — a disarmingly small number that, being unevenly distributed, translates into chaotic weather events (seven of the ten most destructive storms in recorded history having occurred in the last decade), and an unpredictable and uncontrollable cascade of ecological trauma — including now the melting of the North Pole during the summer of 2000, for the first time in 50 million years, and signs of the disappearance of the "snows of Kilimanjaro" the year following; since then this melting has become a fixture.

• Species were vanishing at a rate that has not occurred in 65 million years.

• Fish were being taken at twice the rate as in 1970.

• Forty percent of agricultural soils had been degraded.

• Half of the forests had disappeared.

• Half of the wetlands had been filled or drained.

• One-half of US coastal waters were unfit for fishing or swimming.

• Despite concerted effort to bring to bay the emissions of ozone-depleting substances, the Antarctic ozone hole was the largest ever in 2000, some three times the size of the continental United States; meanwhile, 2,000 tons of such substances as cause it continue to be emitted every day.

• 7.3 billion tons of pollutants were released in the United States during 1999.

We can add some other, more immediately human costs:

• Third World debt increased by a factor of eight between 1970 and 2000.

• The gap between rich and poor nations, according to the United Nations, went from a factor of 3:1 in 1820, to 35:1 in 1950; 44:1 in 1973 — at the beginning of the environmentally sensitive era — to 72:1 in 1990, roughly two-thirds of the way through it.

• By 2000 1.2 million women under the age of eighteen were entering the global sex trade each year.

• 100 million children were homeless and slept on the streets.

These figures were mostly gathered around the year 2000, and served to frame the first edition of The Enemy of Nature by calling attention to a remarkable yet greatly underappreciated fact: that the era of environmental awareness, beginning roughly in 1970, has also been the era of greatest environmental breakdown. No sooner, then, did the awareness of a profound threat to humanity's relationship to nature surface than it became overwhelmed by a greater force outside this awareness.

Each of the above observations has had its specific causes — the production of a certain gas, the dynamics of the auto market or of the habitat of a threatened species, etc. — but there must also be a larger issue to account for the rapid acceleration of the set of all such perturbations — and, necessarily tied to this, the appearance of increasingly chaotic interactions between the members of this set. There is, therefore, some greater force at work, setting the numberless manifestations of the crisis into motion and whirling them about like broken twigs in the winds of a hurricane.

It is this larger force that the present work investigates, under an obligation imposed by the colossal failure of the reigning environmental awareness. I say "obligation," because of the gravity of the present crisis. If we take this crisis seriously enough — and what, in the whole history of the human race, has had more momentous and dire implications? — then we are obliged to radically rethink our entire approach. Happily, many more people, including experts of one kind or another, are now recognizing the scope of the crisis and what is at stake. Unhappily, they mostly remain blind to the essential dynamics; thus, the great range of recommendations are puerile rehashes of what has already failed: exhortations to live more frugally, to recognize and respect our embeddedness in nature, to recycle, to find and approve better technologies, to vote into power environmentally responsible politicians, and so forth. None of these recommendations is without merit; they all need to find their place in a comprehensive approach. But what makes that approach comprehensive needs to begin with recognition of the "greater force" whose impulse drives the crisis onward.

Now the reader already knows the name of this force from The Enemy of Nature's subtitle: that we face a choice between "the end of capitalism" or "the end of the world." So there seems to be no suspense: as a mystery story, The Enemy breaks the basic rule by giving away the killer's name on the dustjacket. But the crime remains unspecified and the revelation superficial, chosen, I must confess, to catch the reader's attention and tug at that rising yet indefinite awareness that, yes, this damned capitalist system is wrecking nature. The real work lies ahead — to make that awareness definite, to clarify what capital is and what nature is, to understand capital's enmity to nature, to understand it as not just an economic system but in relation to the entire human project, to see its antecedents and consequences, and, most importantly, to fathom what can be done about it.

There is certainly no time to waste. The five years since The Enemy of Nature appeared have done nothing to dispell its basic indictment. Thus, the World Wildlife Fund's annual "Living Planet" report on the health of the environment for 2006 indicates that the "ecological footprint," a complexly-derived term that signifies the degree to which human society consumes and degrades nature, has risen some 20 percent since 2001, the year that The Enemy of Nature went to press.

This has to be understood in context of the only other global parameter that tracks along the same path, namely, the accumulation of capital, which is what the euphemism of "growth" signifies. I do not mean that capital exactly parallels the breakdown of our natural firmament. It really cannot, because capital in its essence is not directly part of nature at all. It is rather a kind of idea in the mind of a natural creature (us) which takes the external form of money and causes that creature to seek more of what capital signifies. As we shall show, it is this seeking, through economy and society, that degrades nature. Thus capital, money-in-action, becomes both a kind of intoxicating god, and also what we call below, a "force field" polarizing our relation to nature in such a way that spells disaster. From being the creature of nature we have become capital's puppet.

A hint of this can be glimpsed in a recent report which outlines the ascendancy of capital over the economic process itself. As of 2005, when the calculations were last made, the money-inaction (stocks, bonds, and other financial assets) flitting about the globe comprised the whopping figure of $140 trillion. As a report in the Wall Street Journal put it, this is more than three times the amount of goods and services created that year. It is the motion of this money-wealth that spurs economic activity; thus capital flows induce the flow of nature's transforming. And the more rapid, i.e. reckless, the flow, the more devastating to nature. This of course is not the WSJ's conclusion, but one we develop below. The article merely notes that by 2005, cross-border flows hit $6 trillion, more than twice the figure for 2002, the year The Enemy of Nature was published. This is the face of globalization, with capital racing across the planet and sucking nature and humanity into its maw. Moreover, "[g]lobal financial flows are likely to accelerate in the coming years. 'The growth in trade in financial assets is proceeding about 50% faster than the growth in trade' in goods and services, says Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard." In other words, there is a whirlwind to be reaped.

To account for this and point the way toward its transformation, The Enemy of Nature is divided into three parts. In the first, "The Culprit," we indict capital as what will be called the "efficient cause" of the ecological crisis. But first, this crisis itself needs to be defined, and that is what the next chapter sets out to do, chiefly by introducing certain ecological notions through which the scale of the crisis can be addressed, and by raising the question of causality. The third chapter, "Capital," lays out the main terms of the indictment, beginning with a case study of the Bhopal disaster, and proceeding to a discussion of what capital is, and how it afflicts ecosystems intensively, by degrading the conditions of its production, and extensively, through ruthless expansion. The next chapter, "Capitalism," follows upon this by considering the specific form of society built around and for the production of capital. The modes of capital's expansion are explored, along with the qualities of its social relations and the character of its ruling class, and, decisively, the question of its adaptability. For if capitalism cannot alter its fundamental ecological course, then the case for radical transformation is established.

All of which is, needless to say, a grand challenge. The ecological crisis is intellectually difficult and horrific to contemplate, while its outcome must always remain beyond the realm of positive proof. Furthermore, the line of reasoning pursued here entails extremely difficult and unfamiliar political choices. Even though people may accept it in a cursory way, its awful dimensions make resistance to the practical implications inevitable. The argument developed here would be, for many, akin to learning that a trusted and admired guardian — one, moreover, who retains a great deal of power over life — is in reality a cold-blooded killer who has to be put down if one is to survive. Not an easy conclusion to draw, and not an easy path to take, however essential it may be. But that is my problem, and if I believed in prayer, I would pray that my powers are adequate to the task.

In the middle section, "The Domination of Nature," we leave the direct prosecution of the case to establish its wider ground. This is necessary for a number of reasons, chiefly, to avoid a narrow economistic interpretation. In the first of these chapters, the fifth overall, I set out to ground the argument more deeply in the philosophy of nature and human nature. This is entailed in the shift from a merely environmental approach to one that is genuinely ecological, for which purpose it is necessary to talk in terms of human ecosystems and in the human fittedness for ecosystems, i.e. human nature. If the goal of our effort is to build a free society in harmony with nature, then we need to appreciate how capital violates both nature at large and human nature — and we need to understand as well how we can restore a more integral relationship with nature. These ideas are pursued further in Chapter 6, which takes them up in a historical framework and in relation to other varieties of ecophilosophy. We see here that capital stands at the end of a whole set of estrangements from nature, and integrates them into itself. Far from being a merely economic arrangement, then, capital is the culmination of an ancient lesion between humanity and nature. We will argue that domination according to gender stands at the origin of this and shadows everything that follows with what will be called the gendered bifurcation of nature. This means that we need to regard capital as a whole way of being, and not merely a set of economic institutions. It is, therefore, this way of being that has to be radically transformed if the ecological crisis is to be overcome — even though its transforming must necessarily pass through a bringing down of the "economic capital" and its enforcer, the capitalist state. We conclude the chapter with some philosophical reflections, including a compact statement of the role played by the elusive notion of the "dialectic."

Then, in Part III: "Paths to Ecosocialism," we turn to the question of "What is to be done?" Now the argument becomes political, and, because we are so far removed these days from transforming society, to a blend of utopian and critical thinking. An important distinction between this and the first edition is that these alternatives are emphasized in the light of what to do about the carbon economy that results in the greenhouse effect, and therefore, provides the most salient dynamic of global warming. This entails critically confronting the important contribution of former Vice-President Al Gore, and his An Inconvenient Truth. We begin with a survey of existing ecopolitics in Chapter 8, to see what has been done to mend our relation to nature, and to assay its potential for uprooting capital. One aspect of this critique is entirely conventional, if generally underappreciated. We emphasize that capital stems from the separation of our productive power from the possibilities of their realization. It is, at heart, the imprisonment of labor and the stunting of human capacities — capacities that need full and free development in an ecological society. Therefore, all existing ecopolitics have to be judged by the standard of how they succeed in freeing labor, which is to say, of our transformative power. The chapter ranges widely, from the relatively well-established pathways to those relegated to the margins, and it generally finds the existing strategies wanting. It concludes with a discussion of an insufficiently appreciated danger, that ecological movements may become reactionary or even fascistic.

Having surveyed what is, we turn in the last two chapters to what could be. In Chapter 9, "Prefiguration," the general question of what it takes to break loose from capital is addressed. This requires an excursion into the Marxist notion of "use-value," as that particular point of the economic system open to ecological transformation; and another excursion into the tangled history of socialism, as the record of those efforts that tried — and essentially failed — to liberate labor in the past century. Finally, the chapter turns to the crucial matter of ecological or, as we will call it, ecocentric, production as such, using for this purpose a synthesis with ecofeminism, a doctrine that connects the liberation of gender to that of nature. We conclude with the observation that the key points of activity are "prefigurative," in that they contain within themselves the germ of transformation; and "interstitial," in that they are widely dispersed in capitalist society. In the final chapter, "Ecosocialism," we attempt a mapping from the present scattered and enfeebled condition of resistance to the transformation of capitalism itself. The term "ecosocialism" refers to a society that is recognizably socialist, in that the producers have been reunited with the means of production in a robust efflorescence of democracy; and also recognizably ecological, in that the "limits to growth" are finally respected, and nature is recognized as having intrinsic value, and thereby allowed to resume its inherently formative path. This imagining of ecosocialism does not represent a kind of god-like aspiration to tightly predict the future, but is an effort to show that we can, and had better begin to think in terms of fundamental alternatives to death-dealing capital. To this effect, a number of pertinent questions are addressed, and the whole effort is rounded off with a brief and speculative reflection.

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Excerpted from The Enemy of Nature by Joel Kovel. Copyright © 2007 Joel Kovel. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd and Fernwood Publishing.
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